How Moms Take a Shower

Case One: During the School Year

1. Grab a set of clean clothes.
2. Grab some clean towels.
3. Shower.
4. Dry off.
5. Get dressed.
6. Make sure bathroom is clean.

Fin.

Elapsed time: 10-15 minutes.

Case Two: During Summer Break

1. Decide to take a shower.
 2. Hunt down clean clothes from the various places they may be waiting for you to fold them.
3. Wait until kids are all entranced by various media.
4. Head to bathroom.
5. Remember last night Kid #3 had a late bath and left all his toys in the bathtub.
6. Start removing said toys.
7. Realize Kid #3 managed to melt an ENTIRE BAR OF SOAP in his bath, causing everything to be covered with a lovely white film.
8. New plan: Put toys in toy bucket, leave toys by sink, wash when done with shower.
9. Start to leave the toys by the sink.
10. Realize you now have attention of half the kids and as soon as you leave, they will probably grab said toys and end up losing them all over the house, while still completely filthy.
11. Decided easiest way to avoid situation is to wash the toys before you shower.
12. Wash toys.
13. Start to head to the bathroom. Notice your toothbrush in next to the kitchen sink (never a good sign).
14. Thoroughly scrub toothbrush.
15. Finally return to bathroom.
16. Discover it is occupied.
17. Wait for Kid #1 to finish.
18. Try to enter bathroom.
19. Are stopped by Kid #3 who now has to go.
20. Wait for Kid #3 to finish.
21. Decide when Kid #3 is done to make Kid #2 go so he doesn’t interrupt you 5 seconds after you’ve turned the water on.
22. Wait for Kid #2 to finish.
23. Announce you are showering.
24. Lock self in bathroom.
 25. Realize there is now no bar soap (see above).
 26. Decide to use shampoo instead, cause whatever…
27. Realize there is very little shampoo left because yesterday Kid #1 & #3 were “having a day” so you couldn’t get to the store before their ADHD meds wore off.
28. Grab the hand soap from the sink and shower using a mixture of that and the last bit of shampoo.
29. Get dressed while answer 8 questions through the bedroom door.
30. Return to bathroom.
31. Clean wet toilet paper off the floor??
32. Calculate how many more days until school returns.

Fin.

Elapsed time: 1 hour.

It is now almost 12pm and you get to make everyone lunch. Have a great day! 😀

Title image by Malte.

My Nemeses – In Three Pictures! :D

Dying of pollen. Made a list of my enemies. Surprisingly, none of you are on it.

If you all find me dead one morning, one of these will be the cause. Goldenrod is the most likely culprit, but mornings and first pages are right up there.

We Are Updating Your Computer

Earlier this year my computer was in its death throws. I tried to fix it, scan it, even nuke it from space (reformat). Nothing worked. It happens, computers die. The problem was it was a new-ish computer and I didn’t have the money to buy a new one. As a last ditch effort I upgraded to Windows 10. In all honesty I’m not sure if that made the situation better or worse.

I have very low expectations for computers. And to be fair, MOST of the time Windows 10 works fine. It runs my programs. It saves my work. It connects to the internet. It runs Word and Minecraft.

Simple. Easy.

However, Microsoft has decided it’s a great idea to let Windows 10 decide when and how to download and install its updates. For some reason, Windows continues to reset my computer without asking, and, more importantly, without allowing me to save my work. Then two weeks ago it gave me a mini heart attack. I had been writing at the time and thought I lost an hour’s worth of new words.

Thank God Above, autosave had gone off five minutes’ before the restart!

After recovering my work (and my heartrate), I noticed my computer was running slow. Turns out Windows had helpfully reinstalled all the Microsoft apps I’d removed to improve the computer’s performance, including the creepy HAL wanna-be, Cortana. So, I went back in and re-uninstalled all the damn apps and disabled Cortana.

Computer restored, I moved on with my life.

Then this Friday, it did it again! This time I left my computer on while talking with my husband, came back and it was in the middle of updating.

Very few things on Earth make me angry enough to curse – asshat computers are one of them. I didn’t lose any work, but this time I decided enough is enough. I went through all the settings, looking for what the hell was letting Microsoft update whenever the hell it wanted to.

First I discovered Cortana was back, as were all the uninstalled apps. So I, ever so calmly, uninstalled them, for like the eighth f***ing time. Then after checking it hadn’t changed any of my settings, I got to the Windows Update screen.

For those of you who have not yet discovered this yourself, let me walk you through getting there so you can see this insanity personally.

Near the ‘Shut Down’ and ‘Log Out’ buttons should be a gear marked: Settings. You want to click the gear which will bring you to the Windows Settings screen. Click ‘Update & security’ then ‘Windows Update’.

At the top of the page is your Update Status. This tells you if your computer is up to date. The part you need to look at is right beneath that. It reads:

Update settings

Available updates will be downloaded and installed automatically, except over metered connections (where charges may apply).

As you can see, this is NOT an option, this is a statement of how this program works. The auto-updates are a feature, not a bug. But look beneath that and there are options. Surely there must be a way to fix it so it updates in the middle of night instead of when I’m bloody using the thing.

Hahaha! No.

If you click on ‘Chang Active Hours,’ you will find the following:

Active hours lets us know when you usually use this device. When a restart is necessary to finish installing an update, we won’t automatically restart your device during active hours.

Note: We’ll check to see if you’re using this device before attempting to restart.

Right, so we already know the Note part is BS, as the damn thing restarted while I was actively typing. I’ll just change it so it won’t update while I’m awake. That should fix the problem. Would have been nice if they’d told me that initially, but whatever.

I’m a stay-at-home mom, a website editor, and a writer. I’m on my computer A LOT. So I set the little time boxes to Start Time 7am and End Time 1am, as that’s how long I am generally on my computer either actively working or listening to music while I do other things. However, when I tried to save my settings, I noticed the Save button was dithered out. Why pray tell? Well, because I’d done it wrong, said the cute little message that popped up below the time boxes:

Active hours can be set between 1 and 12 hours.

Let me repeat that.

Active hours can be set between *1* and *12* hours.

Yes you and I are both reading that right. Windows 10 doesn’t give you the option to be actively using your computer for more than 12 hours at a time.

I looked at the other options. All the other options. None of them allow you to change this. Basically, Microsoft has decided you don’t need to be using your computer all the time, just half the time. Literally HALF THE TIME.

I have no idea what to do with this information besides let others know so they can be prepared to save their work when this insane program decides it needs to update.

If anyone out there has a fix for this besides burning it and salting the earth, I would appreciate it greatly.

Title image by me.

Three Like Me – Day Three: Professor Stein

If you know me from online or know me causally in real life, I would bet my first two character picks were unsurprising. This last one? Well….

In my life I am mostly what you see is what you get. Positive, mom-like, easily amused, and empathetic. But in the back corners of my mind and the far reaches of my subconscious is something else: Some of it is me. Some of it is monsters. All of it is dark, twisted, and unstable.

Professor Stein is all of those things as well. He is from the anime Soul Eater, which is one of my favorite animes ever. It has a very unique art style and a very interesting premise.

The main characters are students at a school run by the personification of death. Half of them have the ability to turn into weapons, the other half then wield them to defeat evil humans and witches. Their goal is to collect 99 evil souls and the soul of one witch. That will give their weapon enough power to be wielded by Death himself.

Professor Stein, as noted by his title, is not a student. He is an insane scientist who thinks the world exists to be dissected and experimented on. Nothing is off limits, even himself. Despite this he tends toward the side of good in his more rational moments. But when a great being of evil and chaos is accidently released, his madness takes over and his insanities return making him more and more unpredictable.

That sounds like me right? Don’t think so? Maybe you need to look deeper.

Some of it is me.

I have a dark side, everyone does. That bit of you that tells you to do stuff you shouldn’t. It haunts you with nightmares when you sleep. It pushes intrusive thoughts on you when you wake. It is evil to its core, but in me it’s not alone.

Some of it is monsters.

I am tormented by the duel demons of Depression and Anxiety. Not the little bits that come from being human. No, these are the freakish horrors that attacked my heart and soul for uncounted years. With the help of meds and therapy I have subdued them, but they are not gone.

This other side of me rarely comes out. Only now and then do I let anyone glimpse of what lies beneath my surface. Except in my writing. These days my characters take the brunt of my insanities. I channel my demons onto the page and there they wreak havoc on the people inhabiting my imagined worlds.

My cousin and fellow writer, AughtPunk, likes to say she is waiting for the day where I am published and on a panel at some geek writing con. My fans will come expecting some goth/gritty/grimdark person and get a cheery mom that brought cookies for all the attendees. The stories I write at first look like my polar opposite, but really they are a reflection of sinister beasts within, waiting to escape the page and my mind and torment my soul once more.

Or, you know, maybe I just like writing creepy stuff. With me there’s no way of telling for sure.

Three Like Me – Day Two: Alice

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There is one of my favorite stories of all time. The idea that one could travel through a mirror and find another world that was slightly off from our own fascinated me. As a child I wanted to be Alice. I wanted to discover the impossible and try to understand nonsense in a way no one had before. I never grew out of those feelings.

My life has been a series of discoveries. Did you know that if you touch the seed pods on these flowers they explode? Did you know you can use a pan of fresh snow to cool off homemade fudge or frosting faster? Did you know that the way you tell if something in the sky is a star or a planet is that planets don’t twinkle?

Did you know you can make a boat out of tin foil and float it down the streams of water that form on the streets during a rainstorm? Did you know if you do that as an adult, the neighbors give you weird looks for weeks afterwards? Yeah, that last one is still an issue somedays…

Aside from finding wonder in the world around me, in the people I meet, and the art and science that ties them all together, Alice and her curious world also influenced my life and my writing in a big way.

My dreams tend to be epic adventures and the one I had in October of 2010 was no exception. I dreamed a girl found herself in a strange world, where magic powered advanced technology. I told it to my husband and he suggested I write it down, maybe even turn it into a story. NaNoWriMo was only a month away and he had friends who’d done it in the past, maybe I should try it myself.

At first I thought it was a silly idea, but the story kept following me around, poking at my brain and tickling my imagination. Who was she? Where was she? How had she gotten there? It was that last question that got me excited. Why she got there through a magic portal of course! With the support of my unsuspecting husband I began my journey. In one month I wrote 80,000 words. I wrote so much I had to get wrist braces, which luckily I don’t need anymore.

When NaNo finished, my cousin and I went to an after party event. I got people’s names and we started our own forum so we could continue our writing. It worked for a while, but I needed more help and feedback. I started following writers on Twitter. I started a writing blog. I started a writing group with my cousin, my brothers, and later my friend Erica, who I met through the group, which still meets every other week. I joined a proper forum, on some weird site called Fantasy-Faction.

Now here I am almost six years later, polishing my story, Mark of the Essence, while, and at the same time, working as the editor at Fantasy-Faction. We have been nominated and even won some amazing awards. We even published an anthology!

All the friends I have online and even some in the real world, all writing tricks I’ve learned, all the authors I’ve read and discovered, all of it is thanks to my love of Alice and her portal adventure in the realms of make-believe. As Alice said, “It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.” And I couldn’t be happier.

You can read day three here.